Thoughts on the “Media as Extended Family” theory

I mentioned this theory yesterday in my review of the book, The Body Myth by Margo Maine and Joe Kelly. The book provides a detailed examination of the individual, familial and societal factors behind our current cultural idealization of female youthfulness, thinness and physical perfection.

In reviewing societal factors that help perpetuate the Body Myth, Maine and Kelly suggest that mass media has replaced our extended families of origin in guiding our worldview and beliefs about what is desirable and undesirable.

While our nuclear families still have considerable influence over our thoughts and beliefs, the roles of our extended families have been diminished as we continue to become ever more overscheduled and isolated from a sense of community outside of our immediate family. At the same time, technology and the variety of media continue to expand at an exponential pace, and have come to fill the void left by out withdrawl from other aspects of face-to-face community.

This theory made a lot of sense to me. I grew up in the 1980’s and 1990’s, when the primary source of media was television. The internet first became readily available as I was going to college. I can still remember the sounds of my dial up modem connecting to AOL.

In my day job I work with school aged children who have grown up with the internet and social media as an unquestionable constant in their lives.

As a late edition Gen Xer I am familiar with and comfortable using technology (such as this blog), but even so I already see significant differences in use of and access to technology between my generation and the generation that came just after me.

If I want information about something, I will google or search wikipedia and read a text file about it. When the kids I work with want information, they will search youtube or google images and watch a video how to do something or look at a picture of it. And they aren’t stuck sitting at a computer to do it!

My generation, and even moreso the current generation have been been saturated with media messages in a way few, if any, generations before us have. Instead of asking grandma Sally or Uncle Bill for advice, we watch a reality show or ask Uncle Google or Aunt Wikipedia. And most of us rarely, if ever, stop to question the advice we are being given, instead accepting it as absolute fact.

Tomorrow I will be examining in more detail how the media messages about body image have evolved over time.